TO360 wayfinding signs are designed to help pedestrians navigate the city in an intuitive way, with heads-up maps orientated to face direction of travel, a 5 minute walk circle to encourage walking and illustrated landmark buildings to reinforce a mental picture of the area.

T-Kartor worked alongside Steer Davies Gleave in the development of a pilot project of 62 signs, which were tested on the public with very encouraging results. People were happy to see the City taking the initiative to develop a wayfinding system, and felt it would provide a big benefit to the city:
* 13% reduction in walk times for specific journeys
* 33% increase in walking trips and 27% increase in time spent walking in the area
* Over 50% reduction in auto mode share for journeys that start and finish within the area
* Over 50% reduction in people feeling lost

The 2012 Outline Business Case was updated based on the pilot evaluation resulting in an estimated benefit-cost ratio of 3.7:1. This means that for every dollar invested, almost four dollars are returned through transportation benefits over the 25-year project life cycle (including capital costs and maintenance).

The study also confirmed that a city-wide GIS database would best serve the future requirements of the City. This core system will be totally scalable for a large number of end-users and product families, feeding into other systems (such as the PATH underground walking network, cycling network and transit routes) and providing viewers with a way to explore off-street destinations.

T-Kartor are providing local area maps at all Luas tram stops across Dublin when the new Luas Cross City extension goes live in December. The passenger transport maps are being provided to Ireland’s National Transport Authority in association with our partners, creative agency Catalysto.

Our maps will help travellers to find their destination when alighting at the tram stop and improve connectivity with other forms of transport nearby, including rail, bus, cycle and taxi.

We are producing these for the NTA as part of a system designed to generate affordable maps, using open data, at rail stations across Ireland. Our online management portal will be used to order and deliver the maps, and can be extended to support asset management with a geographic product overview.

With the Cross City, Dublin is getting a sought-after extension to the hugely successful Red and Green Lines developed in 2004. This new line traverses the city centre to join the existing routes, adding 13 central stops, then continues 6 km north to the rail station at Broombridge. It also connects areas north and south of the River Liffey, acting as an interchange between Luas, Bus, Rail and Taxi modes.

The Luas network has experienced passenger levels in excess of 34 million per year, and the Cross City extension is expected to increase this figure by another 8 million. It is also projected to result in 1 million fewer journeys each year by private car.

New York City MTA (Metropolitan Transportation Authority) are taking a major step towards the future of transport information design with digital screens being installed at 33 newly renovated subway stations.

T-Kartor were asked to develop a specially designed digital version of the printed local area maps we are creating for all 450 subway stations.

Optimised for low resolution
This special adaptation is necessary because digital screens, even so-called HD (high definition) screens and televisions have a very low resolution, compared to your laptop or desktop monitor. This means that smaller features and symbols, or lighter texts are rendered illegible. The images below illustrate the problem:

T-Kartor carried out a thorough study of fonts, colours and text sizes to achieve increased legibility. Finally, specially designed graphic files were tested in prototypes of the screens, including a study of the ambient conditions, which will influence colours and contrast.

The result was a fine, legible map, which a viewer will perceive as identical to the established printed brand and a wealth of expertise gained, which will form valuable input to the success of future interactive products.

We are proud to have increased our share of TfL’s cartographic framework. T-Kartor is now the sole supplier of pedestrian and cycling information products containing mapping from the Legible London Database (which T-Kartor maintain under a separate contract).

A whole family products are included in this contract:

Local area maps
Highly-detailed geographic local area maps used for various ad-hoc purposes

Legible London mapping panels
These ‘heads-up’ maps are rotated to match the direction of travel and are placed on a number of pedestrian sign types. Additional information on these signs include street and landmarks indices and directional arrows to nearby neighbourhoods, landmarks or transport nodes.

Continuing your journey posters and leaflets
Highly-detailed geographic local area maps used at transport nodes such as station exits and bus station hubs. These maps usually appear with a schematic map of bus or river services. In some cases they are reproduced as an A4 leaflet.

Cycle Hire Docking Stations
These maps appear on the cycle hire infrastructure and involve an added technical complexity. The position of all nearby docking stations are shown on each map, so these maps are created paying consideration to the latest status of all stations within a certain radius.

We look forward to four more years continuing our excellent relationship with our highly valued customer.

Citi Bike in New York City is mainly being used for a short stage of a longer multi-stage commute, illustrating the importance of good wayfinding information at cycle hire stations.

A new report into New York’s Citi Bike scheme has been released by the NYU Rudin Centre for Transportation, available for downloadhere.

Citi Bike is proving a success, with 14 million trips during 2016 representing a rise from 10 million the previous year. By the end of this year the system will have doubled in size to 12,000 bikes and 700 stations. The NYU Rudin Centre for Transportation claims that the diversity of transportation modes are what ‘makes New York move’.

The report suggests that riders are using Citi Bike for ‘last mile’ connections on longer transit trips, closing gaps in the fixed route public transport network.

This is why T-Kartor specialises in producing map information specially designed for each stage of the journey. In order to encourage a shift to sustainable forms of transport, complex journeys must be simplified and more options must be simply presented. At bus stops, for example, we produce maps of available bus services, but also local area maps for those searching for their destination, and onward journey maps showing alternative modes of transport in the vicinity.

Information designed specifically for each mode of transport (including walking and cycling) requires basemaps in varying scales, formats and media. T-Kartor’s City Mapping Platform provides one core basemap, constantly maintained in collaboration with city authorities, with outputs to all necessary scales, formats and media. These include information totems, printed posters, hand held map leaflets, digital displays and smart phone apps.

Always keen to use our mapping products in situ and view them from a user perspective, I recently decided to carry out some research at the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. The last time I visited was at the height of the Olympic Games and the area was teeming with tourists clutching the T-Kartor produced Host City Map.

I have read about legacy plans for the area and the London Legacy Development Corporation, a mayoral planning authority with the remit to manage ongoing regeneration of the Park and surrounding areas. One stated goal was to link the Olympic Park to the communities in the surrounding urban area. Legible London wayfinding maps are intended to help towards this goal, so I planned to see how well the system works in reality.

As part of T-Kartor’s creation and maintenance of the Legible London database, we developed the online LLAMA portal, from where Transport for London (TfL) can manage Legible London products in a geographic asset management view (above). From the portal I could see the positions of 43 Legible London products. An excel output broke down the details: 11 bus stop maps, 8 vicinity maps at stations (including DLR) and 23 walking totems, of which 4 are OWCRE (Olympic Walking and Cycling Route) signs along the canal towpath. In addition, the LLAMA portal allowed me to study the layout and rotation angle of each sign, and see a preview of the printed artwork (below).

What struck me on arrival at Stratford Station is the complexity of the area. A vast shopping centre and transport hub were my first impressions, but without a map it would be very difficult to appreciate its layout. I made my way across a huge raised walkway towards the old Olympic Stadium, now home to West Ham United Football Club, where I hired a (TfL) Santander cycle.

I often hire a TfL cycle in London, and head off in any direction with the confidence (due to the high density of mapping products) that I will not get lost. Although I was very unsure of the area, I soon came across map products and felt confident to explore.

The area is still heavily under construction, and does have a very deserted feel about it. However, I am fascinated by the level of investment in infrastructure that is still going on, years after the Olympic Games left town. The area is trying to encourage growing businesses, with Here East digital quarter, 3 Mills Film and TV Studios and International Quarter London (new home for progressive business).

My cycle ride took me first through the slightly desolate park, around the outside towards Hackney Wick, then along the canal riverwalk. Within a very short cycle I had experienced areas of urban decay and vandalism; recreational areas along the canalside, where people tending their barges lended a feeling of safety; vast, barricaded building sites; new business developments and the impressively landscaped grassy verges of the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park.

An area of such contrasts, both negative and positive, needs cohesion and context. Legible London mapping helps by displaying how the area fits together, how to quickly walk or cycle to areas of safety and just how close everything is to where you are standing. The familiar design will have helped many unfamiliar visitors to the Olympics to feel that the area is as much a part of London as the West End.

If anything, I was disappointed by the lack of density of the wayfinding signage. Once away from the Stratford transport hub I found myself worrying that I had cycled ‘off the map’ before seeing another mapping signpost and breathing a sigh of relief.

I had also expected the area to be more complete than it is. I will have to repeat my field study in a few years and see if the sense of cohesion is improved as well as the density of wayfinding signs.

Together with the award-winning design company Familjen Pangea, T-Kartor has completed a project to create new maps for the tram line no 7 to Djurgården. The map designs are based on experience from our successful projects in London, New York, Birmingham, Houston, Toronto, Dublin and Paris.

The detailed maps show all points of interest in the neighbourhood and the best ways to find them or complete the journey to your final destination.

The project also included new maps for the commuter Ferry lines 80, 82 and 89.

“This is yet more proof of our long-term customer relationships with close cooperation and a continuous development of new projects. This project really shows the benefit of using a consistent strategy for Mapping a Connected City to support sustainable mobility strategies. We look forward to supporting Stockholm as it strives towards a Greener Capital.”Erik Körling, Managing Director T-Kartor Content Management

T-Kartor are delivering public transport and pedestrian wayfinding information in Birmingham. This phased delivery includes the production of new mapping and indexing for an expansion of the Interconnect pedestrian wayfinding project as well as updates to the existing totems.

In parallel to this we are working with Centro to refresh information at interchange bus stops in the city and have also created information for three brand new stops at New Street Station. The new and updated artworks communicate recent alterations to bus services and a number of projects that have changed the face of the urban environment. The new stops have helped fans navigate to the recent Rugby World Cup games held at Villa Park and in the longer term will assist passengers traveling by bus from the busiest station outside of London.

Birmingham has recently undergone many physical changes, from the opening of the extensively re-modeled New Street Station and the new Grand Central shopping centre to the Metro tram extension that is due to open shortly.

T-Kartor have produced maps for Transport for London (TfL) for 15 years now and we also created and manage the Legible London mapping database. We have worked on their cycle hire project since it began and have outputted maps from our system for each of TfL’s 700 ‘Boris Bike’ stations across the city.

The cycle hire scheme continues to expand year on year and recent figures from TfL show that 2014 recorded a figure of over 10 million cycle hire journeys taken by customers that year. This is an estimated 12% increase and the 5th quarter in a row numbers have continued to rise – it is also the highest number of instances of bikes being hired since their records began.

Launched in 2012, Interconnect Birmingham is a scheme of pedestrian wayfinding and public transport information that was designed to improved the journey experience of residents and visitors in the city.

T-Kartor have recently finished a cartographic production run for this project where large quantity, rapid production was facilitated using our mapping database. The database was created around four map scales covering Birmingham city centre and was expanded to cover a wider area during the artworking phase. We also designed a series of automated production tools for street indexing and export purposes.

The cartographic production work involved updating all maps, indexes and graphic elements for the existing pedestrian scheme and delivering original artworks for 77 brand new totems for phase 2 of the system. Each side of a totem contains 2 heads-up maps at different scales and all units are double sided, in all we produced 408 maps and 204 indexes in a matter of weeks.

T-Kartor are now working on expanding the database coverage and updating the maps and indexes on the public transport part of the system.

The second major phase of the New York City wayfinding system (also called WalkNYC) has rolled out, locating totems with real-time bus information at SBS (Select Bus Service) stations along a new route of this bus rapid transit system.

Select Bus Service is New York City Transit’s new, innovative bus service designed to reduce travel time and increase the level of comfort for customers. The new B44 route running along Nostrand, Rogers and Bedford Avenues in Brooklyn was launched November 2013 and the route will serve 40,000 passengers each day. The improved passenger information provided by the wayfinding totems will be key to providing a user-friendly customer experience and is another step in the ambition to provide a fully joined-up wayfinding solution to pedestrians, cyclists and mass transit users in New York City.

The cartographic map production was lead by T-Kartor, together with a design team including wayfinding specialists CityID and industrial designers Billings Jackson. Graphic designers Pentagram and engineers and project managers RBA Group complete this team. The map production has been trialed at two stops during the fall 2013, with the rest of the route and two further routes (M34 in Midtown Manhattan and M60 out towards the New York LaGuardia airport) to be rolled out during 2014, with graphic artwork produced by T-Kartor.

A new pedestrian wayfinding system known as WalkNYC has been introduced in the city of New York.

Commissioned by the New York City Department of Transportation and its partners, the system offers pedestrians a series of stylised maps, orientated to ‘heads up’ so the top of the map is always displaying the same direction that the user is facing. This is, in part a reaction to research that showed 33% of people on the streets of the city could not identify which direction was North. The same research highlighted that 13% of locals were not aware of the neighbourhood or borough they were in when questioned.

The project is as much about finding the best way around on foot and discovering points of interest as it is about orientating oneself within the city landscape.

WalkNYC was delivered by PentaCityGroup, a consortium of:

T-Kartor who designed the geographic database and manage cartographic production

Billings Jackson Design – industrial designers

City ID – wayfinding experts

Pentagram – graphic designers

RBA Group – engineers and urban planners

The project is also an extension of the city brand, utilising a new version of the Helvetica font which is used elsewhere in the urban realm. The design also uses a palette inspired by colours within the city, icons that are based on certain design aspects of the Helvetica typeface and an overall look and feel that is reflective of the graphics used within the subway system.

Phase 1 of the roll-out will include approximately 100 ‘totems’ of varying widths dependant on location and will feature the same mapping style already used for the CityBike cycle hire scheme which has 300 stations so far and continues to grow.

Future phases of the project will look to expand the system over a wider geographic area and to include information about other transport modes. Developing into digital and other print channels is also being discussed.